11 ms·

How about also ending grand juries altogether (or at least in cases of potential homicide)? It's obvious that the people on the grand juries are not qualified t

by joesmo 12y ago

How about also ending grand juries altogether (or at least in cases of potential homicide)? It's obvious that the people on the grand juries are not qualified to asses anything and it's an archaic system not employed by any other country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury). In addition, the prosecutors' powers need to be curtailed. Such crimes should always be charged, regardless of what the prosecutor wants. If there is doubt, bring in an outside prosecutor like the article suggests.

anigbrowl 12y ago
I'm inclined to agree about limits on discretion in these cases. You can't take back homicide, so it's better to hold a trial automatically and air the entire issue out. In cases of justifiable homicide, the justification will be much stronger for having been challenged and considered. The English jurist Lord Hewart said it best: 'Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Sussex_Justices,_ex_p_McCarthy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Sussex_Justices,_ex_p_McCar...
- figure_c 12y ago
  Then you run into the problem of innocent, or at least justified, people having their financial lives destroyed defending against murder charges. I don't think it's as simple as "if someone dies there needs to be a trial".
  - jnks 12y ago
    > I don't think it's as simple as "if someone dies there needs to be a trial". But there almost always is in reality, if there's a reasonable suspect. The only exception seems to be with law enforcement officers.
    - Crito 12y ago
      Not really. Iff it makes it to the Grand Jury, then what you said is true. Often it never makes it that far. In many self-defense cases involving non-police civilians the district attorney will decide that no crime was committed and that will be the end of it. One quick example from the top of a google search: http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/janitor-wont-be-charged-in-shooting-deaths-of-2-teens-b99239212z1-253608471.html http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/janitor-wont-be-charged-i...
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Only something like 11 cases out of 160,000 the accused has not been indicted. The prosecutors can already "automatically" put everyone through trial. Not to mention plenty already "have their financial lives destroyed" through the Civil Forfeiture law.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      That's the statistic for federal grand juries.[1] And it has mostly to do with the fact that federal prosecutors only bring slam dunk cases. At the federal level, there is often a lot of consternation about whether what is being prosecuted should be a crime, but it's very rare that a prosecution is brought on shaky evidence. At the state level it's much higher 3-4%. You can say it's a rubber stamp, but in practice the average is raised by the fact that most criminal cases are slam dunk (that kilo of cocaine found in the accused's car is almost certainly his). And the bar for an indictment is relatively low, just probable cause. It'd be pretty uncomfortable if prosecuto so we're bringing lots of cases where they don't even have enough evidence to convince 3/4 of a grand jury there is probable cause. [1] The distinction is relevant because federal and state prosecutors handle totally different sorts of crimes.
    - sp332 12y ago
      And that's only for cases that even made it to a grand jury. I haven't seen any stats about "officer-involved shootings" that never even got that far.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    We could adopt the English approach to coroner's inquiries, which are non-adversarial and don't have any custodial sanctions, but operate in public and can be input to a murder trial if that's appropriate. I don't want to put everyone on trial for murder, but I do think that every death needs to have an open investigation. This would obviously require some fundamental changes to the US legal system, but I think that it's already experiencing severe stress under the weight of its own contradictions.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      Any death in custody in the uk gets investigated even more so in the rare case when deadly force is used.
  - joesmo 12y ago
    At the absolute least, there should be a trial if the accused is known to have committed the homicide like the cases mentioned in the article. In one case, it was caught on tape, and in cases of a shooting ballistics can easily prove this. I don't think any of the officers mentioned in the article would deny that they had committed homicide, only that it wasn't murder. When there has been a homicide like that and the killer is known, there should never be a case without a trial. That goes doubly when the killer is a law enforcement officer. If we want to fix the current problems with policing in America, the only way to do that is to hold LEOs to higher standards than everyone else (and ideally stiffer penalties).
japhyr 12y ago
Prosecutors know how to get an indictment when they want one. We hear that cases involving police killings get treated differently in an effort to have more transparency, or perhaps to allow grand juries in these cases to make a "more informed" decision. I don't buy this anymore. It doesn't provide more transparency, it plants doubt in a group that isn't supposed to be wrestling with any notion of "beyond a reasonable doubt". I served on a high-profile grand jury case once. I came away deeply disillusioned with how this process is said to work, and how it actually works.
refurb 12y ago
It's obvious that the people on the grand juries are not qualified to asses anything and it's an archaic system not employed by any other country This is an odd statement. It's well known that prosecutors have much greater latitude in what they can present as evidence AND the hurdle for proceeding with criminal charges is much lower. The other option is to leave decisions to charge somebody up to the prosecutors themselves. You think that will produce a better outcome? I would imagine you'd see a lot more politically motivated prosecutions.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  Grand juries don't seem to correct the most egregious errors in either direction. Consider the famous assertion that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. On the other hand, consider the recent non-indictment of Darren Wilson. How often do grand juries defy the prosecutor's wishes? I certainly agree that a check on prosecutorial discretion is badly needed. But the grand jury system doesn't seem to be providing it.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Aggregated statistics on grand juries are hard to come by, but let's use a random county for example: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/special-reports/article3967625.html http://www.star-telegram.com/news/special-reports/article396.... Grand juries in Tarrant County, Texas declined to indict 11% of felony cases. Floating around the internet, you can find numbers ranging from 3-4% in New York counties to 5% in Texas as a whole. The high rate of indictments, of course, doesn't prove that the grand jury system doesn't act as a check on prosecutorial discretion. An AMA study found that the largest health insurers reject 2.7-6.8% of all claims: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/18/health-care-america-now/tv-ad-overstates-health-insurance-denials http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/.... Does the low rate of denials indicate that insurers' claim processes are an inadequate check on fraudulent claims? By your reasoning, it does.
    - ScottBurson 12y ago
walshemj 12y ago
Maybe have the attorney general be able to put any police force into special measures if they are failing or become over mighty I am sure that Theresa May can provide some guidance
thrownaway2424 12y ago
There are lots of states without grand jury systems.
tptacek 12y ago
How exactly does eliminating grand juries help with out-of-control law enforcement? Grand juries are a safeguard for the accused. Do they work in practice? No. But eliminating them concedes the problem to the prosecution entirely. You're not the first person I've seen suggest this, and I'm baffled by the logic.
- bronbron 12y ago
  They're most likely thinking about it from the flipside: grand juries rarely (if ever) vote to indict police officers involved in fatal incidents. Not that it changes the point of your argument, just guessing where the motivation for that statement comes from.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  >Grand juries are a safeguard for the accused. Do they work in practice? No. Grand Juries have an especially hard time finding anything wrong with police conduct and are routinely used to "legitimize" questionable police activity. I'm not ready to agree to eliminating them but it isn't hard to understand why someone might throw it out there as an idea.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Why? So we can do away with the pretense?
    - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
      I suppose. "If it isn't helping, it's hurting..." something like that.
- joesmo 12y ago
  If they don't work, they're not a safeguard for the accused, except in the case of police where they obviously wrongfully work as evidenced by the cases cited. It seems to me, that in many cases, they're also a safeguard for a prosecutor who doesn't actually want to prosecute police as well as police who have committed crimes themselves. As far as regular citizens, they really have nothing to lose by eliminating grand juries with grand jury indictment rates being just shy of 100%.

by joesmo 12y ago

anigbrowl 12y ago

I'm inclined to agree about limits on discretion in these cases. You can't take back homicide, so it's better to hold a trial automatically and air the entire issue out. In cases of justifiable homicide, the justification will be much stronger for having been challenged and considered. The English jurist Lord Hewart said it best: 'Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Sussex_Justices,_ex_p_McCarthy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Sussex_Justices,_ex_p_McCar...

figure_c 12y ago
Then you run into the problem of innocent, or at least justified, people having their financial lives destroyed defending against murder charges. I don't think it's as simple as "if someone dies there needs to be a trial".
- jnks 12y ago
  > I don't think it's as simple as "if someone dies there needs to be a trial". But there almost always is in reality, if there's a reasonable suspect. The only exception seems to be with law enforcement officers.
  - Crito 12y ago
    Not really. Iff it makes it to the Grand Jury, then what you said is true. Often it never makes it that far. In many self-defense cases involving non-police civilians the district attorney will decide that no crime was committed and that will be the end of it. One quick example from the top of a google search: http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/janitor-wont-be-charged-in-shooting-deaths-of-2-teens-b99239212z1-253608471.html http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/janitor-wont-be-charged-i...
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Only something like 11 cases out of 160,000 the accused has not been indicted. The prosecutors can already "automatically" put everyone through trial. Not to mention plenty already "have their financial lives destroyed" through the Civil Forfeiture law.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    That's the statistic for federal grand juries.[1] And it has mostly to do with the fact that federal prosecutors only bring slam dunk cases. At the federal level, there is often a lot of consternation about whether what is being prosecuted should be a crime, but it's very rare that a prosecution is brought on shaky evidence. At the state level it's much higher 3-4%. You can say it's a rubber stamp, but in practice the average is raised by the fact that most criminal cases are slam dunk (that kilo of cocaine found in the accused's car is almost certainly his). And the bar for an indictment is relatively low, just probable cause. It'd be pretty uncomfortable if prosecuto so we're bringing lots of cases where they don't even have enough evidence to convince 3/4 of a grand jury there is probable cause. [1] The distinction is relevant because federal and state prosecutors handle totally different sorts of crimes.
  - sp332 12y ago
    And that's only for cases that even made it to a grand jury. I haven't seen any stats about "officer-involved shootings" that never even got that far.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  We could adopt the English approach to coroner's inquiries, which are non-adversarial and don't have any custodial sanctions, but operate in public and can be input to a murder trial if that's appropriate. I don't want to put everyone on trial for murder, but I do think that every death needs to have an open investigation. This would obviously require some fundamental changes to the US legal system, but I think that it's already experiencing severe stress under the weight of its own contradictions.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Any death in custody in the uk gets investigated even more so in the rare case when deadly force is used.
- joesmo 12y ago
  At the absolute least, there should be a trial if the accused is known to have committed the homicide like the cases mentioned in the article. In one case, it was caught on tape, and in cases of a shooting ballistics can easily prove this. I don't think any of the officers mentioned in the article would deny that they had committed homicide, only that it wasn't murder. When there has been a homicide like that and the killer is known, there should never be a case without a trial. That goes doubly when the killer is a law enforcement officer. If we want to fix the current problems with policing in America, the only way to do that is to hold LEOs to higher standards than everyone else (and ideally stiffer penalties).

japhyr 12y ago

Prosecutors know how to get an indictment when they want one. We hear that cases involving police killings get treated differently in an effort to have more transparency, or perhaps to allow grand juries in these cases to make a "more informed" decision. I don't buy this anymore. It doesn't provide more transparency, it plants doubt in a group that isn't supposed to be wrestling with any notion of "beyond a reasonable doubt". I served on a high-profile grand jury case once. I came away deeply disillusioned with how this process is said to work, and how it actually works.

refurb 12y ago

It's obvious that the people on the grand juries are not qualified to asses anything and it's an archaic system not employed by any other country This is an odd statement. It's well known that prosecutors have much greater latitude in what they can present as evidence AND the hurdle for proceeding with criminal charges is much lower. The other option is to leave decisions to charge somebody up to the prosecutors themselves. You think that will produce a better outcome? I would imagine you'd see a lot more politically motivated prosecutions.

ScottBurson 12y ago
Grand juries don't seem to correct the most egregious errors in either direction. Consider the famous assertion that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. On the other hand, consider the recent non-indictment of Darren Wilson. How often do grand juries defy the prosecutor's wishes? I certainly agree that a check on prosecutorial discretion is badly needed. But the grand jury system doesn't seem to be providing it.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Aggregated statistics on grand juries are hard to come by, but let's use a random county for example: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/special-reports/article3967625.html http://www.star-telegram.com/news/special-reports/article396.... Grand juries in Tarrant County, Texas declined to indict 11% of felony cases. Floating around the internet, you can find numbers ranging from 3-4% in New York counties to 5% in Texas as a whole. The high rate of indictments, of course, doesn't prove that the grand jury system doesn't act as a check on prosecutorial discretion. An AMA study found that the largest health insurers reject 2.7-6.8% of all claims: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/18/health-care-america-now/tv-ad-overstates-health-insurance-denials http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/.... Does the low rate of denials indicate that insurers' claim processes are an inadequate check on fraudulent claims? By your reasoning, it does.
  - ScottBurson 12y ago

walshemj 12y ago

Maybe have the attorney general be able to put any police force into special measures if they are failing or become over mighty I am sure that Theresa May can provide some guidance

thrownaway2424 12y ago

There are lots of states without grand jury systems.

tptacek 12y ago

How exactly does eliminating grand juries help with out-of-control law enforcement? Grand juries are a safeguard for the accused. Do they work in practice? No. But eliminating them concedes the problem to the prosecution entirely. You're not the first person I've seen suggest this, and I'm baffled by the logic.

bronbron 12y ago
They're most likely thinking about it from the flipside: grand juries rarely (if ever) vote to indict police officers involved in fatal incidents. Not that it changes the point of your argument, just guessing where the motivation for that statement comes from.
fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
>Grand juries are a safeguard for the accused. Do they work in practice? No. Grand Juries have an especially hard time finding anything wrong with police conduct and are routinely used to "legitimize" questionable police activity. I'm not ready to agree to eliminating them but it isn't hard to understand why someone might throw it out there as an idea.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Why? So we can do away with the pretense?
  - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
    I suppose. "If it isn't helping, it's hurting..." something like that.
joesmo 12y ago
If they don't work, they're not a safeguard for the accused, except in the case of police where they obviously wrongfully work as evidenced by the cases cited. It seems to me, that in many cases, they're also a safeguard for a prosecutor who doesn't actually want to prosecute police as well as police who have committed crimes themselves. As far as regular citizens, they really have nothing to lose by eliminating grand juries with grand jury indictment rates being just shy of 100%.